A PANEL OF ONLINE AUDIENCE research specialists grappled Thursday with issues ranging from simplifying Web metrics to reconciling server and panel-based data to how many Web metrics firms the market will support.

The panelists–featuring top executives from Nielsen Online, comScore, Hitwise and Microsoft, among others–were convened for the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s first Audience Measurement Leadership Forum.

There’s a lot of good to and fro in the piece, and while it is about a different medium, there are many similarities in its struggles.

The conference was aimed at demystifying Web metrics at a time when marketers and agencies have more ways of measuring online audiences than ever. The downside is that there’s more confusion than ever because of the abundance of information available to media buyers from multiple sources that don’t always agree.

Panelists underscored the need for greater simplicity and clarity in Web metrics to help draw ad dollars away from traditional media. That means trying to find the Internet equivalent of gross rating points to help transition from TV advertising to emerging media.

One Comment on “On measurement: does this sound familar?”

Nice post! I actually wrote about this very subject over the summer and this is why I am a huge fan of niche market networks.

Even though this is changing as the DS industry goes more mainstream. We website wise we (as an industry) are ALL (sorta) niche market websites supporting real life digital signage networks -double whammy!

This feeling coincides with some articles that I have read lately regarding advertising and marketing for niche markets. Much of our own website advertising has the same parallel rings as advertising on ds networks does.

So when I read the article about how “Ads that appear in niche websites get more attention from broadband users than ads on sites that have more than a million unique visitors” from Media Post Reports I was pleasantly surprised at the in depth research that has been completed for niche website markets.

Respondents to a Media-Screen survey http://www.media-screen.com/
indicated that they would be slightly more interested in products on smaller sites; they gave 42 percent of the small sites one of the top ratings, compared with 39 percent of larger sites. Media-Screen asked 1,356 broadband users to rate on a scale of one to seven how likely they were to be interested in products on given sites.

“People are more engaged and more involved in the smaller sites that speak to a topic of keen interest to them,” Cate Riegner, Media-Screen’s director of research, told MediaPost, adding that users often perceive their favorite sites to have more interesting ads.

I also recently have been pacified with this article about how “Nielsen Shuts Window on Pageview Rankings”

“Nielsen/NetRatings will continue to provide pageview data but will cease to formally rank them. Ross explained that time spent on a site is a better gauge for the level of engagement users experience with a site.”

So basically, if you sold ads based on the findings you just prove the time spent on the site– BONUS if you can prove your most popular pages as well. The main similiarty I find is you do not know who will buy when (could be a year from now) based on a screen ad or a website ad..and that is hard to prove. So. the eyeball measurment camera needs to know how long certian eyeballs stay on the ad and what particular ads the eyeballs stayed on the longest and of course the more website visitors or shoppers will raise the percentage of staring eyeballs.

The main similiarty I find is: you do not know who will buy when (could be a year from now) based on a screen ad or a website ad..and that is hard to prove even though you know abc user or shopper religously frequented your site or was in front of your screen 200 times the past year.

Makes life fun and exciting. Lot’s to think about. Thanks for the great post..I absolutley loved it.